Where is all the dialogue in content marketing? When you spend more than a decade in the publishing world, you tend to get accustomed to the role of feedback.

Open dialogue with the community is important to ensuring your insights remain fresh and your content relevant.

In the world of content marketing, dialogue with the audience doesn’t happen with regularity. Dialogue is important for building a community. The engagement you have with your audience guides discussion, establishing you as a figure that can facilitate a community.

You definitely have options—ranging from webinars to group discussions on social media. Another option to consider is the TweetChat (also called a TwitterChat).

Not familiar with a TweetChat? Think of it like crowdsourcing a webinar where real-time commentary is happening on your Twitter feed.

I’ve moderated my share of TweetChats, and discovered that when done right they can be a powerful platform for opening up dialogue, creating a bank of content ideas and positioning you as a community facilitator.

The basics of a TweetChat:

Choose a topic and a corresponding hashtag

Draw up a series of questions related to the topic

Invite partners, customers, analysts and others to participate

Promote the Tweet chat to your community to encourage participation

Full disclosure: TweetChat can be risky. What if no one participates? No worries. If set up correctly, this should never be the case.

So instead let’s talk about what can go right. And from my experience, I can point to three things:

You get a ton of content ideas.

Based on the strength of your topic and the list of questions developed, be prepared to receive a stream of good, useable content ideas. Ideas for how participants are thinking and the types of answers they are seeking. Keep a list of topics, follow up on those ideas and develop a subset of your content calendar based on relevant topics.

You establish a role as facilitator

Forget starting discussions on social media groups or posing that survey on your blog. Hosting a TweetChat shows true commitment for building your community. You are engaging with your audience in real-time with the intent of delivering fast response.

You reach a new audience

All it takes is for one partner to tell someone to join, and then they ask two more people and so on and suddenly you have a new set of eyes and ears on your brand. On average, people will be intrigued by the idea of participating in a TweetChat—and if they like what they see in the feed they get involved. And you can follow up afterwards.

Looking to beef up your role as voice for your community? A TweetChat, if done right, can be a quite the tool for making that happen.